Representing the 'other': Images of China and the Chinese in the works of Jade Snow Wong, Maxine Hong Kingston and Amy Tan

Drawing on anthropologist Margaret Mead's theory on American-born children's rejection of the immigrants, this dissertation examines the treatment of China and the Chinese in the works of Jade Snow Wong, Maxine Hong Kingston and Amy Tan, who are among the most influential Chinese American writers. While their works are often studied in relation to Asian American social and cultural contexts, there is one important social-historical aspect—the fact that these three writers are all second-generation Americans and its impact on their writings—that has been largely understudied. Due to the predominant multicultural ideology, critics often comment on the cultural and generational conflicts between the immigrant and American-born Chinese in the works of the three writers without searching for the roots of those conflicts in the context of a typical phenomenon within the immigrant groups in the United States, the phenomenon of the second generation rejecting their immigrant parents. To situate the works of the three writers in this Perspective makes possible a totally different reading. Wong, Kingston and Tan are all second-generation Chinese Americans. Their rejection of China and the Chinese is much more radical than most critics allow themselves to think. Instead of reconciling with their parents and their parents' culture, these three second-generation Chinese American writers detach themselves from them. Their works depict the Chinese in oppositional terms and present them as the “other” as opposed to the writers themselves being Americans.